Understand Usage & Cost
The outcome of this Domain is better understanding of an organization’s use of technology within any FinOps Scopes.
Within this Domain, organizations work to gather all required information about their technology costs, usage, and other metrics; normalize it across data sources; define how it will be allocated among cost centers; and define reporting to make data available for use by all personas in this and in other Domains.
Organizations will gather technology usage data from cloud providers and other service providers; define and gather related metrics such as cost, utilization, carbon use; and document the organizational metadata used to categorize, allocate and summarize technology cost and usage.
This Domain focuses on understanding and allocating all of the cost and usage within the organization. Information and insights generated in this Domain will be used by every other Domain and other parts of the organization for a wide variety of purposes.
The Capabilities in this Domain will help the organization:
- Identify, catalog, and ingest all relevant technology cost and usage data
- Normalize data as necessary across sources, using FOCUS datasets as a priority
- Define an Allocation strategy to map all costs back to internal technology users
- Define techniques and policies to allocate shared cost and resources
- Create and define consistent reporting tools, parameters, and methods
- Define and distribute contextually relevant reporting data to personas where they operate
- Understand and document the needs of allied personas working in intersecting disciplines throughout the organization to understand their technology data needs, including intersecting disciplines such as ITAM, ITIL, Sustainability, and Security
This Domain directly supports these FinOps Principles:
- Teams need to collaborate
- Everyone takes ownership for their technology usage
- FinOps data should be accessible, timely, and accurate
- FinOps should be enabled centrally
This Domain enables an organization to understand its use of technology in any FinOps scopes, what is driving spend, and who is responsible for that spend. Activities in this Domain provides data consistently to support a picture of current technology usage and also a view into historical trends, at a level of granularity to support all the other Domains appropriate to the organization’s current maturity level.
This Domain answers the questions:
- What technologies are we using in all relevant technology categories?
- What are we spending on it?
- What is the impact of that usage in carbon or other metrics important to us?
- Who in the organization is responsible for that usage and cost?
- How can all FinOps Personas access that cost and usage data?
Data Ingestion 
Allocation 
Reporting & Analytics 
Anomaly Management